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1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngThe Millionth Game Blog on the Internethttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com
DubWarshttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/dubwars/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/dubwars/#respondThu, 13 Dec 2018 21:26:49 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1215Read more DubWars]]>DubWars is a twin-stick schmup where you don’t control your own guns — they instead fire to the timing of dubstep wubs and drops. It’s a very fun concept where you’re meant to learn the timings of the drum claps, bass, and what have you, and best position yourself in these moments to deal damage. Thought and care was put into timing the various weapons for each stage and corresponding music track, and it’s cool to anticipate the big WUBWUBWUB sound that means the big laser cannon at the front of your ship is coming. In practice, though, most stages come down to shallow twin-stick skill more than anything like strategic rhythm or musical memory.

You can upgrade health and weapons on a stage-by-stage basis, and these bonuses persist when you beat the stage and replay it on the next highest difficulty setting. I tend to like this kind of thing, where games give you one “easy” mode and then unlock higher-level challenges as you go, allowing you to tackle them with upgrades obtained on the lower modes. The choice of difficulty setting to play individual songs on comes from various rhythm games like DDR or Guitar Hero, of course, but I’ve rarely seen it with the ability to take upgrades forward from one setting to the next (I guess Theatrhythm Final Fantasy did). It makes me think of games like FTL or Defender’s Quest, where I find it fun to “grind my way up” to hard mode rather than it being a question of whether I’m good enough to play on such a mode from the outset.

The ten included tracks are from professional EDM artists — though, admittedly, I had heard of only one of them — but if the audio selections were mine to make, I might have prioritized less predictable tunes (especially in later levels). Rather than having the game get difficult with an increasingly maddening bullet hell pace, I think it would suit the musically-minded gameplay better to only swarm players when they messed up the timing and thereby missed the opportunities to finish off their enemies. I actually do like this kind of music, but I didn’t really hear any tracks that I thought I had to save to a playlist. The drops were aggressive, and good enough as accompaniment for laser beams, but still plain. Rather than some club-like beat from “Nezzo & Summer School”, I would have liked to hear some stuff more in “glitch hop” territory. Something like Vulpey’s Sever would have made for some very engaging sequences. Everyone’s going to have their own preferences, of course. Judge for yourself. I kinda liked Synergy, for one.

I actually don’t think it would be outside the realm of possibility to automate this kind of thing and play with your own music library — games of the sort, like Audiosurf, do exist — but for the computer to decide that your broadside guns should fire on every snare drum hit and how much damage for that to deal on every particular stage would be quite a challenge. In any case, it would be beyond the talents of the developers of DubWars.

I think the main problem for DubWars is an amateurish execution. From the menu buttons to the looks of enemies and stage backgrounds, the game begs for the touch of a graphic designer. The use of color in some stages is a rainbow of vomit, with no “language” to tell the player what’s safe to touch and what will destroy them; very much the sort of thing that’s taken for granted until it’s missing. Each stage is only a static box that you must survive within, but more could have been done there. There’s also a concept called “game feel” which is a kind of nebulously articulated nonsense, but it’s the kind of thing that often makes the very obvious difference between “babby’s first Newgrounds flash game” and “indie darling of the year”, and DubWars doesn’t have it at all. The absence of sound effects to compete for attention with the music may actually be a big part of this, but I don’t think it’s only that.

“Cleanup on Aisle Three?”

DubWars was certainly worth the $1.09 I paid for it, just for realizing the basic premise of a different kind of musical game. I think there’s a lot of room to innovate with games that use “things happening in time with music” as a central mechanic. Some very polished games play with sound in dynamic ways, but there’s a whole uncharted world when it comes to having the timing of a tune affect the game world or abilities of your character, even irrespective of rhythm-based action (like Crypt of the NecroDancer). I imagine not only shooting beams, but moving to music; blinking across gaps and warping space, or seeing profound visual effects like daylight turning to night on a big note. The impact of such a thing could be very beautiful and moving.

Dubwars is just alright though.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/dubwars/feed/0ZacktThronebreaker: The Witcher Taleshttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/thronebreaker-the-witcher-tales/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/thronebreaker-the-witcher-tales/#respondTue, 11 Dec 2018 19:29:24 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1209Read more Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales]]>Thronebreaker is essentially a Witcher side-story in visual novel form. It’s a very well-told one, with beautiful presentation and meaningful reactivity. In this respect, it deserves to be called a Witcher game as much as any other. Its characters are sympathetic, and without exception, voiced by talented and well-cast actors. The art, from the cards to the animated figures in cutscenes, is absolutely fantastic. The music is not only good but impressively dynamic, boiling up as the player puts cards down, which isn’t something I can demonstrate just by linking to selections from the soundtrack on youtube.

Perhaps my favorite thing about it is getting to feel immersed in a story where I’m leading a ragtag army again, experiencing steep rises and falls in fortune, and at times admitting former foes as new allies, gaining new party members. Narratively, it reminds me of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, or even Final Fantasy Tactics in a way. As the story itself goes, it was a bit of an adjustment to go from Geralt, who has the luxury of fighting whoever pisses him off without worrying about whether it causes a war, to Queen Meve of Lyria and Rivia — especially when up to this point, royals in the Witcher world have been consistently portrayed as fickle psychopaths best avoided, and rightly so.

At first I didn’t see eye-to-eye with Queen Meve’s “too proud to bend the knee” attitude, though this was in part because I was affected by the historical context provided by other Witcher games: it seemed like a futile struggle to hang onto a throne in 1267 when I knew that the invading Nilfgaard armies would come back even harder in 1272. To take a class-conscious view, as well as one colored by hindsight, it hardly seemed worth having all her subjects burned alive just for one queen to keep her throne for a while. Later, though, as I started to treat the situation as the present and not a page in a history book, and as it became apparent that Nilfgaard was quite ruthless to the peasantry even after taking the lands, I came around more to Meve’s resistance effort, also in part because she ceases to represent one specific small kingdom’s interests, traveling the world and generally righting wrongs to some extent as Geralt does.

But enough of that. This is a collectible card game, so I should probably talk about cards. It’s not just a visual novel after all. But here is the weak link of the game: the gameplay. The exploration is tedious. The card matches against the AI are, too. I’m actually quite a fan of Gwent, and I was really looking forward to a single-player campaign. But Thronebreaker was so easy (on “Bonebreaker” difficulty) that battles became tedious in their lack of challenge. Mind you, I played Thronebreaker at launch in October. As of December, a patch was released to fix up the pathetically easy battles. So to some extent, it’s a solved problem, but while I’m not playing through the game again, I’ve seen that the changes only boost power and armor values of enemies.

I think the right level of difficulty to aspire to is to occasionally lose battles even without making obvious misplays if your deck is suboptimal, to feel a constant need for gold and wood resources to unlock units that might take off some of the pressure, and (in the later parts of the game) to have battles that realistically can’t be won at all if the opponent has a hard counter to your current deck strategy. It’s possible that the patch changes to power and armor values accomplish this, but it does nothing for the “puzzle” fights, where you’re expected to play a specific hand in the one sequence that will just barely net you the exact point total you need. From what I’ve heard, the Hearthstone single player puzzles often manage to do just that, but Thronebreaker puzzles are rarely so tightly designed. I often had more resources than I needed: at times I’d find myself finished with extra cards to play. Not red herrings, but cards that would solve the puzzle more.

I could define a “hard” Thronebreaker puzzle as anything that took me more than fifteen minutes, and there weren’t many. A puzzle would go like this: I would be shown a board with various cards, each with their own text description of how they react to other cards and situations. Before I’m even ready to attempt a solution, I might first sound out these card mechanics through play, just making vaguely educated guesses by slapping cards down to see what happens, rather than trying to put the bigger picture together in my head. The thing is, I beat a lot of the puzzles on the first or second try during this process — before my brain was even ready to work. Such puzzles are patronizingly easy, and as of this writing, it seems the developers have no intention to change this.

Even putting aside whether they’re hard or not, I hoped for puzzles that were more to Gwent as chess puzzles are to chess. I wanted to be put into the middle of what could ostensibly be a real Gwent game, and find the one sequence that would get me out ahead by the end of a round. But the puzzles were often minigames with entirely custom rulesets, such as those where a “character” would be made “walk around” by swapping places with empty “tile” cards. Yes, I suppose it goes to show that you can technically do literally anything with Gwent cards, but it felt tedious and silly.

Tile-based movement? Why?

I also suspect that the resource curve is still broken, because even if players have to take several tries to win battles now, it doesn’t affect how much they’re earning. I spent the first couple acts of the game worried about how tight money was going to be. When unexpected expenses came up for Meve in the story, I felt the pinch. Early on, I made sure to get the abilities that had a large down payment but increased the amount of gold I would win per fight, but I think this was a mistake, as it’s only in the early chapters that you’re suffocating for want of coin, and by the time these investments pay off, you don’t care anymore. Around Act 4 or 5, there are still story events asking you to carefully consider whether it’s worth buying your way out of a problem, but the answer is always yes, because money becomes worthless. It negatively impacts the narrative. The dialogue options often seemed like they were written with a harder game in mind, and the dissonance can be felt.

Though the game was not difficult, the pretense of difficulty is in its spirit. It autosaves whenever you make a decision, and decisions can result in your friends abandoning you forever, deserters making off with some of your money, sections of your army getting poisoned, or crushed in an ambush. As if it were Oregon Trail, or some roguelike. Even despite how little of an issue it was to lose units and money, the story was well-told enough to make me regret my bad decisions, and I embraced the feeling of having to live with the consequences. That said, I found the autosave system annoying, and not just because it forced me to live with some bugs present in the game at launch. The thing is, I can live with a decision I made, but it’s frustrating to live with a decision I never wanted to make. I missed out on a character because I misinterpreted a dialogue option. That’s something that can happen in any game — though ideally those kinks should be worked out following tester feedback — but if it had been The Witcher 3, I could have reloaded a save in that situation. Did anyone really complain that it wasn’t good to be able to reload a save in The Witcher? Why is it any different here?

I encountered many bugs that have since been patched, so on this I’ll only say that it’s been a while since I played a game at time of launch, and that it has always been a mistake to do so. But to replay it now? I can’t be bothered. I did do a quick rush-through on the easy mode (on which battles can be skipped) to collect some achievements that had been bugged when I first completed the game, but I couldn’t imagine myself wanting to go through the whole tedious experience again of gathering field resources to actually make an army. Frankly, puzzle games and reactive gameplay don’t go well together either: who wants to repeat a puzzle they’ve already found the solution to? It’s a shame, because I did catch a few lines in the story during my little speedrun that picked up new meaning the second time I heard them, bits of foreshadowing and winking hints of twists to come, so I think the writing itself is actually very suited to a second playthrough.

I would very much like to see more “Witcher tales” told through Gwent. To experience the deep lore of the Witcher universe from the perspectives of other factions is very cool, and a Monsters chapter in particular (the witcher equivalent of a Starcraft Zerg campaign) would be absolutely incredible — but only in a streamlined fashion without the tedious gathering gameplay, and with other lessons learned. I’d much rather advance simply to the next puzzle or story node after each victory, even though the artists did such a great job on the Diablo-esque free-roam maps.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/thronebreaker-the-witcher-tales/feed/0ZacktCaptureSubsurface Circularhttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/subsurface-circular/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/subsurface-circular/#respondThu, 04 Oct 2018 00:06:03 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1204Read more Subsurface Circular]]>This is a short, dialogue-driven game. Your character, a robot detective, pursues his case entirely from the seat of one subway car, talking only to the people who sit down next to him. Essentially, he’s getting the public’s perspective, or otherwise that of those who have explicitly sought him out, picking up conversation topics as if they were items. There are some little bits of reactivity sprinkled about, but mechanically, the game doesn’t really do anything I haven’t seen many times before. The best thing it has going for it is the cool visual style and setting — the lighting flatters the scene, and the robots look cool. Their flat geometric designs keep the devs from having to compete with AAA facial expression realism, a daunting task for any indie.

The train advances to new stations only as you reach milestones in your conversations, making it purely a background narrative device, despite its prominent spot in the user interface. It’s a gimmick with unrealized mechanical potential. If they kept the part about not being able to leave the subway network, but added a time component and allowed you to switch lines, that would have opened up some interesting space to design a game about being in the right place and right time to conduct interviews. For example, learning a character’s home and work stops, and then budgeting time to ask two or three crucial questions per stop. Something in the vein of Disgaea Infinite. Instead, you’re fed some puzzles that have a shallow relationship to anything that’s going on, or no relationship at all; non sequiturs like being asked to do a logic grid puzzle before a character will answer your questions. I like those puzzles, but I can do them just as well from a book.

This is from the Thomas Was Alone people, and though it looks very different, it’s not so hard to imagine the same people behind it. I do think it’s a step up from that game, but I also don’t care much for the central story here. It all comes down to your character making a choice between supporting a revolutionary effort or the status quo. In this case, though, the revolution presupposes that humans can best find meaning in their lives from menial labor — the jobs being done by the low-intelligence robot models — while the robots should take over as the decision-makers in society. (I also didn’t learn from the expositional phase that humans were the one in charge of “Management”, and only found out when I was being asked if they should be killed at the first sign of resistance, which probably isn’t the best way to go about it.) No real explanation is offered for how this new arrangement could be better. Personally, I’m alright with taking the humanity out of government and jobs of varying levels of complexity, while keeping people around to work in artistic and social roles, as nannies and caregivers and the like, which are jobs that come up in the game. But staging a coup ostensibly to put humans back in Amazon fulfillment centers? Are you fucking mad? Even if that wasn’t the work that was intended, the discussion comes to an end quickly, without any opportunity to press for clearer intentions. It’s a shame, too, because I almost like this world.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/subsurface-circular/feed/0Zacktsubsurface-circular-3Orwell: Keeping an Eye On Youhttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/orwell-keeping-an-eye-on-you/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/orwell-keeping-an-eye-on-you/#respondMon, 20 Aug 2018 15:43:25 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1198Read more Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You]]>Orwell puts you in control of the modern surveillance apparatus (itself called “Orwell”) of a fictional government during an active terror threat. It’s a story-driven game, and gameplay is scarce: you click through pages on the right side of the screen, and drag text from them into a box on the left, which represents the government’s database. You can be selective about which text items you drag, but that’s all you do. I don’t really mind “interactive novel” experiences where you just click on text, but dragging actions are annoying when frequently repeated, and it would have been nice if I could control-click or have some other keyboard shortcut instead.

The text you’re capable of dragging has already been highlighted, and the webpages and chat logs with information you haven’t found is badged with an “unread” indicator, reducing much of the game to a mindless exercise. Of course, a lot of information is wrong: people may lie, or more interestingly, will write sentences that make sense in context, but would take on a different meaning if thoughtlessly interpreted by a machine. It can be pretty clever with this, and it would probably be a reach to say it can be beaten on autopilot. But you’re still led around by the hand in a way that feels not only restrictive, but arbitrary in terms of being conveniently led to certain pages, such as finding a missing persons page for a small town in Germany after that town becomes a point of interest, even though you hadn’t yet known you were looking for a missing person.

Drag the highlighted text to the left. Or don’t.

A more rewarding gameplay formula might have involved search-based puzzles — not by actually implementing a search engine and typing, but by collecting useful search tags, and figuring out which tags to use together, and where to use them. For example, once you know that Abraham Goldfels emigrated from a small town in Germany, a player might try a search with the “Abraham Goldfels” tag plus the one for the German town to find records of his life there. In this case, no results would come up, because he had changed his name. The game might hint as much to the player. But by instead performing a facial recognition search on a database of driver’s license photos for that area (perhaps only getting hits if the player has collected a photo that wasn’t taken decades after the time of his emigration), the game would reveal his original name, which would become a new search tag, allowing players to find details on his family, his missing person status, and so on. I think that sort of system would have been far more interesting.

Another way Orwell can be restrictive is that it sometimes forces the player to commit to one interpretation of the facts before moving on to find the actual evidence. In other words, you’re sometimes pushed, in a rather phony way, to let the game make its point. I was frustrated in the first episode when I had to report that Cassandra was “opposed to violence” or alternatively that she “sees assault to be justified” based on statements she made at different times online, when I didn’t think either option was much to go on, and wanted to pursue actual leads by digging into her contacts.

Although it would’ve significantly complicated the development of the game, perhaps beyond the capabilities of the indie studio that made it, it also would have been cool to seek to specific time codes on CCTV footage (or even hacked webcams) to identify suspect individuals, as we see in the game’s opening cutscene. This would have been better than trawling through personal websites, which seems kind of out-of-touch, as these barely even exist anymore on the internet today.

It’s probably just to give the player something to do, but it’s a little strange that you have to build profiles on each individual from scratch. I would think that as soon as you have a name and enough other identifying characteristics, you would have their birth certificate, driver’s license photo, employment and military service history and whatever else could be gleaned from a social security number. There’s also no bulk data collection of records to peruse from before the individuals were targeted, as is done in the real world: you can’t look up who a person spoke to on the phone a month ago, much less listen to the call. It’s a puzzling situation when the critique of a surveillance state doesn’t go as far as the real thing often does. You also can only collect data on “targeted individuals”, and can’t target whoever you want with nothing but an obvious cloud of smoke for justification, which weakens the message of surveillance overreach, and makes the game less fun, at that. It would have been more interesting if I could’ve started perversely putting together the life story of one of Harrison’s unrelated girlfriends.

The social commentary is not perfect, and I don’t expect anybody needs to hear about social media oversharing at this point, but it isn’t like a terribly heavy-handed Black Mirror episode either. It’s a well-written story; a legitimately well put-together mystery that isn’t obvious. The twists don’t come out of nowhere, and it has some good red herrings that are not obnoxiously pushed into the reader’s eyes. There’s no mastermind introduced late in the last episode (Knox would approve of this point). Though it trips over itself at times in trying to incorporate subtler ideas into gameplay, the writing itself is more than capable, and there are some optional reads that provide insight into the characters, the government, and corporations without being too thick with unnecessary exposition. It’s funny to see commentary on groan-inducing corporate policies, or on CEOs who believe the world’s problems can be solved with an app.

Orwell also surpasses all expectations of reactivity. The player can lead the police to the wrong addresses or withhold evidence. The story is naturally on rails, but significant points along the way can play out differently, such as whether the cast respects you — the investigator spying on them — by the end of the fifth episode, and how many of these characters are in custody. A terrorist suspect may optionally be prevented from detonating a third bomb, and may also be killed, captured, or allowed to escape, though this divergence is a little shallow, since the suspect never serves as a source for new information in the investigation if taken in alive. But it’s hard to say exactly how shallow anything is, since cause and effect isn’t always clear: in looking through posts by other players, I’ve found that it’s somehow possible to keep Harrison from getting fired, for example, and I’m not really sure what causes Costigan to get killed or simply having his house vandalized instead.

It’s a short game, which is makes it a little more suitable to replay and find these other possible outcomes, but unfortunately, it still moves a little too slowly the second time around. You have to watch people type in their instant message conversations in real time, without a “skip line” button, and many of these chats go on for several minutes. Also, due to the aforementioned linear structure of the gameplay, you’re often just dragging semi-irrelevant content into the Orwell system until the game believes you have absorbed the necessary exposition and decides to advance time, starting new phone calls for you to wiretap. This is another argument for a more open-ended search for hints in each episode. On the first playthrough, you don’t entirely know what’s relevant and what isn’t, so this isn’t noticeable until later.

Orwell is a little clumsy, and doesn’t fully live up to its potential. But I’d still recommend it as a simple, tasteful interactive novel with some good writing, and for the neat divergences in its plot.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/orwell-keeping-an-eye-on-you/feed/0ZacktorwellMetal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Subsistence)https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/metal-gear-solid-3-snake-eater-subsistence/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/metal-gear-solid-3-snake-eater-subsistence/#respondThu, 16 Aug 2018 16:35:56 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1189Read more Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Subsistence)]]>Each Metal Gear game gives players new ways to hide, and compensates by making the guards a little smarter; more conscious of their surroundings. It’s a good direction to trend in. In the first game, you just had to avoid being directly in front of someone. In MGS2, you had to be pretty light on the analog stick even when you were directly behind a guard. In Snake Eater, even this seems impossible, and to get right up behind someone without them sensing anything, you have to use the ultra-light D-pad stalking controls, moving even slower.

Getting the drop on somebody is harder in MGS3’s jungle environments, even if there are no cameras this time, because the areas are more open, and the movement patterns of guards seem less clear than they did in MGS2’s hallways and catwalks. You often have to crawl through the brush. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with getting a guard’s attention in controlled circumstances, especially when a lone guard wants to investigate a moving cardboard box.

Though cover can be vague in the jungle, there’s the helpful new addition of the camo index, telling players exactly how well-hidden Snake is by a number in the corner of the screen. It’s informed by whether Snake is moving, and by how low he is to the ground, but also by a system of disguises and camo patterns to suit the situation. If your camo index is high enough, even bosses will have trouble finding you in the middle of a fight.

The game doesn’t entirely take place in the thick of the jungle — there’s the infiltration of the enemy stronghold Groznyj Grad, and some high-altitude environments — but there are a lot of jungle maps, and I did start to get tired of them. The level design may be an improvement over MGS2 in some respects, but it still suffers from the limitations of highly broken-up environments with screen transitions, where you can just tackle someone and leave before they get up and sound an alert. Groznyj Grad is quite fun in spite of this; it’s like seeing a precursor form of Ground Zeroes.

The next new big thing is survival. The more work Snake does, the hungrier he gets. You don’t have to worry about starving outright, but hunger affects the recovery of your health, the steadiness of your aim, how long you can hold your breath, and even makes Snake’s stomach growl loudly. I found it trivially easy to keep my inventory full of fresh food, but it’s a nice complication to have to stay on top of while infiltrating. It’s fun to try eating new animals to see what Snake thinks they taste like, and some can even be captured alive, allowing you to throw fish or poisonous scorpions at people. There was a risk that a hunger mechanic would be a tedious distraction more than anything else, as it has been in various other games, but it’s funny here, and it meshes well with the other systems, so it feels like a good move.

Hunting wild animals for food is a key new feature.

The other half of survival is first-aid treatment, meaning actually digging bullets out of your leg with a knife, suturing cuts, treating poison, and so on. It doesn’t add a lot to the gameplay in terms of fun factor, and it would have been a lot cooler and more impacting if you had to hide behind cover and do this stuff in real time rather than from a pause menu. But as a ludonarrative device, it’s already very good. It makes the difficulty of long-term survival in a hostile environment feel that much more real. When Snake is really badly hurt after a cutscene, having to actually patch yourself up makes it go from generic and thoughtless game damage — something that doesn’t actually happen, like desync in Assassin’s Creed — to something real, more reminiscent of John McClane walking through broken glass in Die Hard. It’s also used creatively in special cases, like having to dig a transmitter out of your body.

The “Subsistence” edition of the game also added a new camera angle, allowing the player to toggle to a new third-person view from behind, similar to where other modern stealth games put it, instead of using the series’ traditional view from above. You’d think after coming straight from every other Metal Gear, I’d be used to it, or would even prefer it, but every time I toggled to it, I just got confused. Maybe it just doesn’t work so well in jungles or 3D environments, but in any case it was a relic from 1987, and it was good of them to get rid of it. But it can’t be easy to work new camera angles into a rerelease of an existing game, and I still found myself annoyed by the camera at times. Snake’s directional facing when entering first-person view was a problem, as were the sudden disorienting shifts to what I would have called “vent-crawling mode” in MGS1 or 2, which seem to happen arbitrarily while crawling through the brush. It looks like the regular first-person view, but you aren’t holding the view button down as you normally would be, and you lose the ability to “pop up” with the shoulder buttons, even though you can still stand up whenever you want.

The MGS controls have always been awkward, though, more interested in preserving vestigial forms than in trying to cooperate with what every other game in the world might be doing. Snake Eater in particular makes a new misstep by assigning some awkwardly critical roles to the Dualshock 2’s pressure-sensitive face buttons, which were wisely removed from the Dualshock 4. Not only did this control scheme have to be revised for the Xbox 360 port, but I don’t even like it when games put anything more significant than “toggle minimap” onto a thumb stick, given how easy it can be to press those by accident when you’re in a tense situation. Pressure-sensitive face buttons that can kill someone during a no-kills run? Get the hell out of here.

Other new Snake Eater features include the limited durability of suppressors for firearms, and some iterative improvements to CQC melee combat techniques, including the ability to grab an enemy and make them tell you information as you hold a knife to their throat. There are more features for messing with guards, too, now that they go hungry and can get food poisoning. They can also be attacked by wasps when you knock a nest down. But the mechanical innovations and advancements are probably rather meager compared to everything MGS2 introduced. This entry in the series is more to slow down and apply what has been learned, I think. I prefer to see big ideas, but Snake Eater’s new asshole physics do help players to make their own fun. It doesn’t go as far as MGSV in this respect, obviously, but I always appreciate having some open-ended ridiculousness potential.

The bosses are a lot better this time around, in that they don’t arbitrarily abandon what works best about the gameplay just because those features aren’t typically associated with boss battles. You can usually hide from Snake Eater’s bosses, and in one instance even starve a boss out and throw him rotten food, which he’ll eat. One boss, Volgin, has to be fought out in the open, but even with him, there are all kinds of tricks and easter eggs for messing around. He reacts to Snake in numerous ways, such as becoming distracted or confused if the players puts a mask on, sets tree frogs loose in the arena, or eats a “fake death pill” (a particularly clever new tool in Snake’s arsenal).

Though most of the bosses were quite good, the endgame did get annoying with an unending series of shooting gallery segments from the sidecar of a motorcycle, including an obvious chase with a proto-Metal Gear, so the game regrettably doesn’t always live up to the “don’t abandon your own mechanics” rule. At least there were no forced “alerts”, even when the story put me in open combat.

Also of note is the sniper boss fight with “The End”, a man already so old and close to death that if you save in the middle of the fight and don’t play for a week (or if you set your system clock ahead), he dies of old age. It’s a tense and drawn-out encounter, and yet one that didn’t particularly impress me or live up to Kojima’s vision at all, which I can only say because I’ve been to the future. It’s fascinating how the MGS games have continued to reiterate and perfect on some of the same few ideas, all the while rarely seeing these ideas cross over into the works of other developers. When I was so moved by the fight with Quiet in MGSV, I had no idea I was experiencing the cumulative efforts of a series trying to create the perfect lonely “sniper duel” encounter, one that was in the works ever since outshooting Sniper Wolf on the PSX in 1998.

Reactivity can be found in the most amusing and unexpected places, which is one of the series’ best traditions. One of the game’s “boss fights”, The Sorrow, consists only of wading down a river as you’re confronted with all the people you’ve killed. It’s a very short sequence if you’ve only used nonlethal incapacitations, but I realized early into the game that I had no hope of finishing with a zero kill count, and decided to make liberal use of the lethal weapons in my inventory for once, so when I reached The Sorrow, I had to wade past one or two hundred wailing dead people. They appear in the manner they died in: guards stabbed in the throat have their heads rolled back and blood spurting from their necks, guards shot in the dicks clutch their crotches, guards burned alive still screaming and so on. There was one guard I killed up in the mountains, only to see a vulture descend and start eating the guy’s corpse. I shot the vulture and ate it, amusing myself at the indirect cannibalism, but not really expecting the game to ever make a point of it. I was wrong, as those obscure situations are reflected in the underworldly river too: the guard wades past, still being pecked at by vultures, shouting “You ate me!!”

The story is far more sensible and down-to-earth this time, at least by Kojima’s standards. Some things haven’t changed — the Cobra Unit is the latest menagerie of over-the-top freaks that need to be killed off one-by-one to give Snake something to do, just like with the members of “Dead Cell” in MGS2, and Liquid’s FOXHOUND renegades before that. But for the most part, things are more James Bond in style, evidenced by the gadgets, the romantic spy storyline, Snake’s British-accented advisor, and of course the game’s excellent theme song. Being a prequel set in the 1960s, it evades a lot of Metal Gear baggage. Instead of elaborate plots about clones and clownish villains screeching about nothing, the characters tend to talk about the Cold War, and about intelligence agencies hanging their special operatives out to dry. I don’t even care that much about James Bond, but I found it earnest and refreshing.

It’s not like that! It’s for the camo index!

Many of the characters are great, but especially The Boss, Snake’s tragic mentor figure. She’s positioned as the villain, but more often than not, she’s seen trying to deescalate unnecessary violence, and even tries to keep Snake safe, by beating him up if necessary. I enjoyed Snake’s trope-subverting relationship with EVA, and Ocelot’s obsession with Snake. There are references to movies like The Predator and even The Fugitive, and there’s a great fakeout scene about how Snake ended up losing his eye, since Big Boss had to get his trademark eyepatch somehow.

I would call this the “best” MGS game I’ve played in terms of serving up a complete package, though MGSV had the benefit of countless iterative improvements and other new big ideas that resulted in a game with greater highs, but less consistency, and I still like it the most. But MGS3 has a strong and grounded storyline, and it provides a decent balance of solidifying the series’ foundations while exploring a few new ideas in its survival and camo mechanics, though these aren’t earth-shattering additions. It depends what you’re after, but I would say this is an excellent starting place for new players who don’t feel like going as far back as Metal Gear 2.

This game was thoroughly enjoyed by the reviewer. It is an excellent game that may be too simple or not ambitious enough to be a 5, or there are design flaws meaningful enough to prevent it from enduring as something truly beloved. Highly recommended.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/metal-gear-solid-3-snake-eater-subsistence/feed/0Zacktgsdx_20180814204950-froggsdx_20180814174031-blackfaceMetal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Substance)https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-substance/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-substance/#respondSat, 11 Aug 2018 02:32:24 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1182Read more Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Substance)]]>Unlike its predecessor, Metal Gear Solid 2‘s gameplay innovations were dramatic. To list the most obvious: Analog movement allows players to move in close to enemies, even on noisy floors, without having to crawl. Bodies are persistent and discoverable. Guards can be “held up” by training a gun on them at close range from stealth. Enemies are not linked as if by hive-mind anymore, and must actually radio for help when sounding an alert, but their radios can be destroyed. Some specific guards have the job of regularly reporting in to the command post, and if these guards are incapacitated, more guard teams will be sent to learn why (though extra guards ought to be moving to the adjacent areas, given how easy it is to leave a strut while the command post is just starting to get suspicious). Nonlethal incapacitations have been added, with new tranquilizer pistol and sniper rifle options. Guards taken out in this manner will eventually wake up, but if other guards find their sleeping friend, it will be viewed as negligence rather than an emergency situation, which means nonlethal players don’t really ever have to bother stashing bodies into lockers.

I’m pretty sure that several of these ideas were original ones at the time. But 2001 falls under an era of gaming that was probably even more awkward than the first batch of late-90s 3D titles. I may be generalizing, but there’s an unjustified confidence in the games of that period. MGS1 had ugly character models, but was aware of it, and avoided framing a scene as such, not relying upon facial expressions except through some great hand-drawn codec screen art. Even though MGS2’s models still aren’t much to look at, the game confidently declares that it is ready for its close-up, so it feels like it has hasn’t held up as well as the previous title, visually and stylistically. (I’m also sad that the codec art is gone.) Games also became more sophisticated at this time, but more confusing too, without the modern on-screen button prompts we have now to get us through those situations. Developers began to take on bigger challenges than simply navigating 3D spaces and clicking heads, often without guideposts to follow: we started to see more “escort missions” with suicidal AI.

And in fact, two characters need to be escorted. It isn’t fun to help either of them, but neither is it terribly frustrating: your charges can die unexpectedly, but their health bars tend to be manageable if your own performance is fine and you’re killing the things that would hurt them. What bugs me more is that these combat situations are mandatory; that I can’t sneak to where I need to be at my own pace, skipping the sword fights with waves of storm trooper ninjas. The combat system is adequate — definitely a step up from MGS1, even if it has some weird movement controls in first-person view — but nobody is playing for it.

There is one boss fight I really liked: Fatman, who skates around planting bombs that have to be disabled by quickly spraying them with coolant, while also doing your best to interrupt and damage him before he can plant more. The other bosses were either grueling or easily exploitable due to blind spots in their AI.

MGS2 takes place on “Big Shell”, a structure of linked hexagons built in the ocean. It looks exactly like the Mother Base later built by the player in MGSV (and apparently in Peace Walker before that). Kojima must have liked the design, and I think it made for a cool base myself, but when it’s the sole location apart from the prologue, the environments seem inflexible, even if the interiors of each strut vary considerably, apart from all of them having roughly the same square footage. At one point, a section of the Big Shell is destroyed, and you have to move along the wreckage, which sort of keeps it from repeating itself, but the narrow, burning catwalks around the periphery amount to an even greater restriction of your options. The last stubborn holdout of the keycard mechanics from the original Metal Gear — having to actively equip the keycard before the doors will open — is now gone, but apart from a few return trips to the warehouse, this barely affects you. Rather than a sprinkling of level 3, 4, and 5 doors to remember the locations of for later in each strut, there tends to be exactly one new route for each security level, telling the player in a clean, linear, gamey way where to go next. When it’s like this, the fun of actually getting your access privileges upgraded is gone anyway.

One bright spot in the level design is that it makes better use of the 3D space than MGS1 did, with balconies and ledges to drop from, but this is only true occasionally.

The collection of secrets and easter eggs are truly impressive, including use of the directional microphone to listen in on distant characters, codec calls made from quirky locations and circumstances, and reactive dialogue about some of the most trivial things I had done. After finishing the game, I looked online to see what little gags I had missed, with the answer being probably 80% of it. They anticipate players doing every remotely perverted thing possible in the game’s engine, like equipping the porn magazines (an item which has the primary purpose of distracting guards if dropped on the floor) while making codec calls from the women’s bathroom. I always admire devs putting in the effort for things most players will never know about.

I really wasn’t expecting Otacon to comment on the rest of my camera roll when I went to upload mission photos, but I loved that he did.

The story of MGS2 goes to a thousand places pretty quickly. In Kojima’s effort to subvert all expectation, Solid Snake is not the main character, but he still has plenty of time on-screen, and I think I like him just as well in a support role. In his place is Raiden, a young anime bishie who lacks Snake’s arrogant charm, often whining about his orders and arguing with his girlfriend each time the player radios her to save the game. From what I’ve read, it sounds like the new protagonist was very contentious when the game first came out, and I wasn’t sure where any of it was going early on — especially his rather mundane relationship problems with Rose — but Raiden’s personal history and relationships are one of the narrative experiments that I think have a better payoff than most of the other things going on.

To give a taste of those “other things” in the story: Snake is framed for an act of terrorism by the Illuminati. A third clone of Big Boss (and former POTUS) fronts a group trying to destroy the Illuminati through a detailed plan which involves the seizing of an oil spill containment facility, former Spetsnaz mercenaries, a nuclear bomb, and the kidnapping of the current POTUS… and he’s manipulated into every little part of it by an AI, testing its own capacity to make perfect soldiers. It oscillates between beyond-cartoon campiness and the Unabomber manifesto in massive dumps of exposition, sometimes throwing so many insane ideas in a span of thirty seconds that I needed to reload a save before the cutscene in the absence of a pause or rewind button, because if my head ever started to spin, I’d only fall behind.

But some of this content is earnestly thought-provoking, especially looking back now at Kojima’s ideas about manipulation of overabundant information, which seem like a prescient description of not just the scale of modern internet filter bubbles, but more critical events in recent memory, like Facebook’s ad-targeting in the 2016 election. If only these themes weren’t delivered in such a clownishly convoluted package. The MGSV story was also messy, to be sure, but the entire style of storytelling here is so alien to the game I started with that I’ve given up on truly reconciling the eras of Metal Gear into a cohesive whole, Revolver Ocelot especially.

Fourth-wall breaking and pranks are still very much a part of the Metal Gear brand here. A year before Eternal Darkness, MGS2 was pulling even better tricks as Raiden’s world fell apart. I was getting badgered by nonsense codec calls every time I took a step, my map turned into something resembling a woodcut of Dante’s Hell, and my radar minimap got replaced with an image of some woman sitting on a deck chair. I got a fake Game Over screen in the middle of a fight. Raiden finds out that his girlfriend is a lie, and still has to call her to save the game. If saving existed as it does in most games, as something apart from the characters, done from the pause menu, that would not have been possible, and it’s a brilliant device.

An innovative title in the stealth canon. Its artistic vision ranges from bold and subversive to boring and repetitive, and it would have been better off abandoning some spectacle sequences and putting its quiet infiltration mechanics to greater use, which were hamstrung by the modular and isolated environment. But I much prefer this kind of experimental sequel to a safe one.

This game was thoroughly enjoyed by the reviewer. It is an excellent game that may be too simple or not ambitious enough to be a 5, or there are design flaws meaningful enough to prevent it from enduring as something truly beloved. Highly recommended.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-substance/feed/0Zacktmgs2-olgaMetal Gear Solidhttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/metal-gear-solid/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/metal-gear-solid/#respondTue, 07 Aug 2018 22:14:14 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1166Read more Metal Gear Solid]]>The Metal Gear series made its transition to the 3D era by copying just about everything the older MSX2 titles did. The resulting game is, to my surprise, far more recognizable from MG2 than from MGSV. It makes for an unexpectedly easy adjustment when playing the games back-to-back, as I’ve been doing.

The controls are identical, and the view tends to be similarly fixed overhead. Yes, there’s some occasional use of first-person aiming, but only in specific contexts, such as when using the sniper rifle, and even at those times barely making use of the vertical axis. Even the structure of play is the same. Progress is still gated by a sequence of keycards, though doors indicate their security level now and you only need to keep the highest-level card. This is what I had been wanting since the first Metal Gear. You still tap walls, distracting guards or listening for hollow sounds where they can be blown apart with explosives. You’re still restricted to a single compound of three or four buildings for the duration of the game, open enough for backtracking at most times.

The bright side of this is that I found myself plenty willing to make my own route through the game instead of following a guide. But while it’s good to be permitted to run back if you missed the thermal goggles or whatever, the backtracking is often forced and frustrating. Being made to leave in the middle of a boss fight to go back to get an item needed to win is a strange thing to ask of players. (The item is also inaccessible before meeting said boss, and requires passing back through a cave full of wolves in both directions.) Worse is when you must continually change the shape of a key by exposing it to different temperatures before using it again (another recycled idea from MG2). Getting back to where this key needs to be used means having to climb over the body of a deactivated Metal Gear something like seven times, and that’s assuming you never screw it up. If you’re too slow, the key loses its temperature, and you’ll have to make the trip a few more times, passing through a couple very long elevator rides along the way. I might have even praised Kojima for such an absolutely, overtly trollish move, except that I was just forced to do it.

There are a few other things that I can only describe as mean-spirited trickster level design. Another recreation of an MG2 scene has you running up like fifty thousand flights of stairs. Only, in this incarnation, there’s a rope in the corner at the bottom, and if you get to the top and didn’t pick it up, the game tells you to go all the way back down for it. Then, in another stairwell, you come upon an unavoidable turret. If you throw a chaff grenade to temporarily disable it and run past, then as soon as you get up enough flights of stairs for the chaff grenade’s effect to wear off, you’re stopped by a turret again, except this time there are two of them. The most obvious response is to throw a second chaff grenade and keep going, but as soon as you’re vulnerable to turret fire again, you come to a section of stairs with three turrets. Then four. It’s like the game is flipping you off, saying, “I hope you brought enough chaff grenades, bitch.” Again, it’s kind of funny, and at least the level design carries an intent, even if it’s a malevolent one, right? I’m not sure if I’m right to think less of the game for it all, but it did convince me to just watch the best ending on YouTube instead of going through all that again, for whatever that’s worth.

There are also little things like Snake catching a cold and randomly sneezing until you find cold medicine, which reminds me of some of the silly features I loved so much in MGSV. It’s somewhat mischievous to have your stealth hero suddenly making noise on his own, but I consider this one more amusing than harmful. And it’s certainly not as if all the humor is mean-spirited. I couldn’t possibly list every tiny little clever thing, but some of the big ones had long since been spoiled for me, like Psycho Mantis commenting on the saves on your memory card, for instance saying “You like Castlevania, don’t you?” if you’ve played Symphony of the Night. Everyone breaks the fourth wall all the time: at one point, the Colonel tells you that to contact Meryl, there’s a screenshot on the back of the game’s CD case that shows the frequency she’s on.

Yup, it’s there.

The combat isn’t really up to the standards of the rest of the game. Snake’s locked-in-place three-hit melee combo is nothing to build a fighting system around, and a lot of bosses come down more to finicky invincibility-frame timing than anything else. Even in stealth, I don’t want to hit those melee buttons if I can help it: the controls for choking a guard to death are pretty unreliable. You need to run up behind them, but if you’re still moving, you’ll execute a throw instead of a choke hold, which is very easy to do by accident. Once you have the silenced pistol, you’re probably better off not trying to break any necks, but the guns can be awkward to aim, too. Especially the assault rife, which can only have its direction changed while firing.

A huge effort was put into the codec conversations. It’s without a doubt the most iconic thing about the game, which isn’t two discs long on the PlayStation because its levels are big. Everything is voice acted, and everyone has something to say, or even several things, in the middle of each boss fight and anytime you make progress in your objectives. They’re all a very likable bunch, whether it’s the first-generation American weeb Otacon, or Snake’s relationship with the Colonel. There are also like four hot women advising Snake over the radio, and they have quite interesting histories, though one of them is unavailable for most of the game, and another just gives one-sided lectures about nuclear disarmament and the clusterfuck that was the collapse of the USSR.

So what the hell is actually going on in this game? Is Kojima a genius? I still don’t know, man. He can actually be subtle sometimes: I remember hearing a theory — or maybe it was something Kojima said himself, I don’t know — that as straight as the Metal Gears are played, with the series never directly making light of the threat of these nuclear bipedal mechs, it’s all an ironic comment on American defense spending; they’ll spend a trillion dollars developing some gigantic robot that can ultimately be taken out by one guy with a Stinger missile. It’s extremely clever if it’s true, and I can believe it. On the other hand, it’s a very Kojima thing to go on for way too long about nothing, like Liquid Snake ranting about DNA and evolutionary psychology, which reminded me of Skull Face in MGSV making a twenty-minute speech about language to a guy who just sat there not even pretending to give a shit, probably because Keifer was too expensive.

This is exactly the question I would expect from a guy about to shoot me with a big fucking chain gun.

Though Solid Snake wasn’t the one voiced by Kiefer, his story has more of the trappings of a 24 storyline, though an ’80s action movie is the more apt comparison. I’m sure Kojima wanted to make something in the genre, which typically serves as propaganda for the American state, with the hero carrying out the orders of the US government to stop terrorists — “bad guys”. It’s not quite satire, but the US foreign agenda isn’t portrayed as a benevolent or altruistically motivated one — just one that is temporarily aligned with a good cause. Snake isn’t very patriotic, either, so there’s more than just a name tying him to Snake Plissken. But it’s very different in tone from the Big Boss prequels. The dark forces in American politics are still treated as lone actors.

As an individual, Solid Snake seems easier to get a read on than Big Boss: he’s arrogant, and he doesn’t care too much about goals or ideology. He’s someone who has lost his ability to put trust in other people. By this point in the series, at least, we aren’t told much about his childhood or past.

As for Ocelot and Miller, I don’t have a clue what’s going on with them. It’s hard to look at Ocelot the same way knowing what he does to Meryl in this game, regardless of whichever ending is canonical — I recall him doing some torturing in MGSV as well, and not even necessarily for a good cause, but Meryl is far more straightforwardly innocent. At the very least, it’ll probably take a few more games before I can understand them as the people they (retroactively) came to be in MGSV.

Metal Gear Solid has some dodgy combat sequences, mean-spirited setups, and a script which tends to babble. It also relies a little too hard on the ideas and features of a Metal Gear 2, which had been played by approximately none of the people who loved MGS when it was released to the world in 1998. But it’s still an excellent step for the series, and an extremely inspired, lovable work.

This game was thoroughly enjoyed by the reviewer. It is an excellent game that may be too simple or not ambitious enough to be a 5, or there are design flaws meaningful enough to prevent it from enduring as something truly beloved. Highly recommended.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/metal-gear-solid/feed/0Zacktmgs-cdback.jpgmgs-olympicsSnatcherhttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/snatcher/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/snatcher/#respondSun, 05 Aug 2018 22:53:39 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1162Read more Snatcher]]>Another early Hideo Kojima game. Originally released in ’88, there were references to it in Metal Gear 2 (and Ground Zeroes, for that matter), so I figured I wouldn’t half-ass this whim of mine by leaving Snatcher out of my retrospective review series. Again, there are a thousand slightly different versions, but my choice was made easier this time by the fact that most of them were only in Japanese. The one I played was a 1994 Sega CD remake, obviously emulated. Who knows what a Sega CD even is?

In brief, the game is about robotic skeletal-looking creatures of unknown origin, “Snatchers”, who kill people and then transplant artificial skin and hair in order to take their place in society. The player is a “Junker”, a member of a kind of investigative police force devoted to killing them. It’s all very Blade Runner. It was ambitious for its time, I suspect especially so for its earlier PC-8801/MSX2 incarnations, which weren’t voiced and had to make do with very simple color palettes. The version known to English speakers came after many of the classic LucasArts games, but is more of an Ace Attorney-styled graphic adventure, using cinematic illustrations instead of moving character sprites. It almost definitely inspired 2064: Read Only Memories and countless other games.

Also, Kojima seems to have gone overboard, planning a six-act story that was ultimately chopped to three, with the third act rushed. Sounds familiar.

Are… are you sure?

Much of the praise Snatcher got, and continues to get, seems foolish to me in 2018. The voice acting isn’t bad, but the performances are somewhat stilted. The story has some Cold War political exposition, and it creatively imagines the technology and culture of the mid-21st century, but it’s also cliched. I don’t really mind that Gillian is an amnesiac protagonist, and the big twist of his background isn’t predictable (thankfully, he’s not a Snatcher), but the coming of some kind of bombshell from his past is too obvious — especially after searching for Gillian’s name on the police computer — and it doesn’t really exceed the imagination nor land any emotional punches when it finally comes. Villains, on more than one occasion, explain their master plans to Gillian before he can spring free of their traps, seeming more like they’re from Saturday morning cartoons than anything that needed to be memorialized for decades as a landmark in the history of interactive storytelling.

As with Kojima’s later title Policenauts, which I was much more impressed with, there are some needless shooting gallery segments to keep the player awake at times. In this one, you don’t need to reload your gun, and there’s just a grid of 3×3 spaces on screen to aim at, so it’s much easier. Sometimes an innocent person gets in the way, but shooting them will just force a Game Over, as far as I’m aware. In terms of reactivity, I think it’s at an acceptable level for the genre: it doesn’t diverge, but there’s occasionally a line of dialogue about how Gillian pestered some of the game’s women too much, or about how he exceeded expectations in the target-practice room.

There are a few fun secrets, like phone numbers you can dial (I may have missed some of them), and the precinct computer, where you can type almost any character’s name to get background information on them. The entries update when characters die, too, which is some very appreciable attention to detail.

Navigating and solving mysteries is kind of a mess. There are typically two menus, “Look” and “Investigate”, occasionally with other extra options available. One would think this is straightforward enough: “Look” would give a basic description, while “Investigate” would take action: to pick up an object or turn it over or open it, or to search someone’s pockets. But every object is listed in both menus, even if it’s there’s nothing to be done with it, as with a street sign or a store window. More often than not, “Investigate” just provides a different description. What’s worse, the game occasionally expects you to use the same option 3 or 4 times, for no reason but to be obtuse and difficult. You may have to Investigate once and then Look three more times. The only thing keeping players from getting stuck forever is that they’re locked in these rooms until they meet the requirements. I would have preferred a pixel hunt.

When the game does expect you to do more than tap through all the options, it quickly becomes frustrating in a different way. In one instance, you have to build a composite witness sketch by selecting facial elements through a multiple choice interface. How, exactly, is this face more “bony” than that one? How are these not “thin lips”? I also got stuck trying to identify the name of a hospital by typing it — the jerk whose mystery I was trying to solve couldn’t have written “Queens” instead of writing “Search the house” and putting a chess queen in his pocket? It’s often contrived like that. What makes it worse is how much it beats you over the head with relatively easy answers when the characters are reaching solutions without player intervention, like when they really spell out the similarities between the maps of Neo Kobe and Moscow.

Same, dude.

The structure sometimes gets in the way of the player solving immediately obvious things, like my guess that moving a vase would activate a secret mechanism, or that Katrina would go to Gillian’s apartment after fleeing another scene (they make you check for her everywhere else first, and trying to go to the apartment sooner provokes a response in the vein of “This is no time to rest!”).

The plot can be flat-out baffling, as when Mika — an adult coworker — gets captured after unlocking the sealed, secured room she was hiding in, which she says she did because she was scared and didn’t know what to do. (At that point I said, “Okay, she’s either a Snatcher carrying out some very convoluted ploy, or she has the worst survival instincts of anyone on the planet,” but I guess it was the latter.) There was also a part where I was investigating a scene to find Snatchers, and it was assumed that they had long since cleared out of there, but then a Snatcher throws a fucking dog through the window, and Gillian doesn’t even try to go out into the backyard to hunt them down, instead basically saying “Well, I guess that’s that,” and driving back to the precinct. Huh?

The game is otherwise quite funny at times, and very ’80s. There are still phone sex hotlines in this universe, for example — the operators tend to get philosophical or break the fourth wall — and multiple characters say things like, “A 5-inch floppy disk? I haven’t seen one of these in years!” which was either a subtle gag, or Kojima dramatically underestimating the rate of technological obsolescence, given that these characters’ grandparents probably never saw a 5-inch floppy disk.

One last thing that bugs me: the element that most drew me into the story was my curiosity about the Snatchers — wondering what they actually thought and felt, and whether they tried to justify their killings at all, given that their AI(?) was apparently sophisticated enough to flawlessly blend in with humans. But the answer only comes in the rushed third-act exposition, and seems kind of underwhelming and unsatisfactory. The mastermind isn’t even a Snatcher himself, so he doesn’t really help there. Probably the most insight you get into their minds is by talking to Lisa, and it isn’t a whole lot.

Snatcher is a decent game, but only that. It’s been claimed at various times that adventure or story-driven games are dead, but I don’t think Snatcher quite holds up to the ones we have today. I appreciate it a little in the context of its contemporary scene, doubly so if the older PC-8801/MSX2 version shared any of its cinematic ambition, but I think if Snatcher were released to a wider audience today, the result would be disillusionment more than anything else.

The reviewer finds this game hard to get excited about, but still has a positive opinion of it. It may be somewhat fun, having good features or ideas counterbalanced by a few boring parts, bad design or other fundamentally irritating qualities that can’t easily be overlooked. Alternatively, it could be pleasant, but with nothing new to offer. Worth a little money if you’ve got the time for it.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/snatcher/feed/0Zackt28SNATCHER_00217SNATCHER_016Metal Gear 2: Solid Snakehttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/metal-gear-2-solid-snake/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/metal-gear-2-solid-snake/#respondSat, 04 Aug 2018 16:05:05 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1158Read more Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake]]>Metal Gear 2 came out in 1990, but incredibly, it wasn’t released in English in any form until 2006. The improvements over the original Metal Gear are obvious at a glance. It looks great, especially with the PS2 port’s beautiful new portrait art and detailed opening cutscene. Then you gain control and begin to see what this game did for the stealth genre, which is nothing short of amazing.

Yeah, man.

For a start, enemies have sophisticated patrol patterns now, moving across the larger map. They can be tracked over a mini-map radar of the adjacent screens, as the game keeps track of everyone in the current zone. It’s ambitious, to say the least. It also means you can step out of a room and walk right into a guard if your timing is bad, because they don’t snap back to default positions each time you change screens.

By making noise, for example by punching a fence, I can put guards into an investigative state, drawing them away from their posts. If I’m seen, they enter an alarmed state, and guards continue to hunt me until I break line of sight and crawl into a hiding place (crawling is new, too). Guards have more reasonable visual fields now, and at times will even turn their heads independently from the rest of their bodies. Sometimes there are sections of flooring that are made out of different, noisier material than the rest of the ground, forcing me to watch my step.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because I’m describing the fundamentals that have been present in every good stealth game to follow. The first Metal Gear had you avoid cameras and lines of sight to make your life easier, but it didn’t invent those ideas. The features in its sequel are entirely original, though, as far as I can tell. I didn’t know any of this stuff had existed before the stealth games of the 3D era, like Thief: The Dark Project. I’m pleasantly surprised by the history lesson.

I actually did try to do this one nonlethally, only using my weapons for the boss fights. It would have been nice to have been given a few weapons that worked in no-kill runs, as even the rather niche gas grenades are deadly, but since it’s just an optional challenge, I guess I brought it on myself. (Also, I get a feeling of deja vu complaining about this…)

Another nice change is that radio responses are based on whatever you’ve last done and what your next obstacle is, rather than where you happening to be standing when you call in.

Many of the Metal Gear franchise mainstays (which I got to see for the first time in MGSV) got their start all the way back here, as well. Cassette tapes to mess with guard AI, for example; playing the national anthem to make every guard stand perfectly still. While the cardboard box was in the first game, it was only really used to remain stationary while waiting for a moving camera to sweep past, but now if it’s left out in the open, guards may take a few casual shots at it, allowing you to stay undetected by remaining still, as long as you’re willing to lose a bit of health. There’s also a bulletproof variant which makes more noise when you move. It falls far short of the absurdly complex MGSV system which had cardboard box durability, waterproofing, the ability to leave empty cardboard boxes behind, an upright walking mode, anime decals and all that ridiculous stuff, but it’s a giant leap forward.

It also has a very Metal Gear storyline, unlike its predecessor. Story plays a much bigger role. There are cutscenes; we learn who people are and what motivates them. The basic themes are established: Big Boss is already preaching about how he was built for conflict and can’t handle peace and all the rest of the stuff he went on about in MGSV.

15 years earlier, this old-ass eyepatch guy looked like Kiefer Sutherland, but Kiefer is like fifty, so… sure, I guess.

I’ve been effusive so far in my praise, but there are some nasty bumps in the gameplay, mostly in area design. Some unfortunate features return, like ridiculous instant death traps that can only be avoided by dying and repeating through trial and error (or by following a guide). Some areas are just tedious, as you spend an eternity tailing a single soldier through a Lost Woods-esque jungle, or wading through a swamp, or navigating spiral-shaped hallways, as if Big Boss built his base to trap a minotaur, rather than for efficiency or for any benefit to security.

The annoyance of keycard-swapping makes a return as well, likewise based on no predictable security principle, apart from maybe one instance where you get into a bathroom with the lowest-security Card-1. There is one minor improvement with the introduction of master cards, which replace your keycards with a colored card in groups of three, so you can get a red master card to get into a Card-1 or Card-3 door more conveniently, but this shouldn’t have been necessary at all, and you still have no way of knowing which card will open a door. If, for example, you have the first five keycards (there are nine in total), you still might have to scan the red card, then Card-4 and finally Card-5 before actually getting a door open, if any of them even open it in the first place.

Metal Gear 2 was absolutely ahead of its time, extraordinarily complex for a game released in 1990, both mechanically and cinematically. But it’s essentially required to play through it with a guide, which is the main thing keeping me from calling this a 5-star classic masterpiece on par with Super Metroid or Chrono Trigger or something. I recognize that my impression of those titles has been colored by my playing them as a child, and I might’ve been more likely to put Metal Gear 2 on the same level if it had actually been available to me at that age, but it wasn’t, so I can only review it as I see it. Just remember that scores are fake anyway.

This game was thoroughly enjoyed by the reviewer. It is an excellent game that may be too simple or not ambitious enough to be a 5, or there are design flaws meaningful enough to prevent it from enduring as something truly beloved. Highly recommended.

]]>https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/metal-gear-2-solid-snake/feed/0Zacktmg2-1computermg2-2bossMetal Gearhttps://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/metal-gear/
https://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/metal-gear/#respondSat, 04 Aug 2018 13:20:51 +0000http://millionthgameblog.wordpress.com/?p=1155Read more Metal Gear]]>No time like the present to finally get into the Metal Gear games in earnest, starting with 1987. Like all Metal Gear games, or at least the first five or so, there are a billion versions of Metal Gear, forcing me to do a bit of homework. I wound up playing the PS2 version, which is the definitive port of the MSX2 original. It has an updated translation, better graphics than the NES-based ports, and tracks some stats for replays/challenges.

It’s pretty hard to call this a stealth game. You can get overwhelmed if a camera sights you, at which point you’re flooded with enemies until you leave the zone you’re in, but there’s otherwise no reason not to play this like a Contra instead. The new endgame stats show how many alarms you tripped and how many guards you killed, which means you can challenge yourself to avoid these, and I like this feature, but it’s admittedly kind of shoehorned into the PS2 port just for fun. It didn’t really seem appropriate in gameplay itself to worry about it: there are several points at which alarms are unavoidably sounded, and there are no nonlethal means of incapacitation, though you can stun someone with a blow to the head for a couple seconds and they won’t freak out once they recover. On the other end, it can be so unintuitively easy to avoid a guard’s narrow laser-beam-like field of view that it’s poorly tuned for an immersive stealth challenge.

True, some of the classic stealth ideas are here: you won’t always want to fight, and loud noises like gunshots attract attention, for instance (you quickly find a suppressor for the pistol and SMG, making this rarely worth worrying about). But for the most part, going loud only affects the screen you’re currently in, and everything resets when the screen moves. Cardboard box aside, it feels closer to the 1986 The Legend of Zelda than to a Metal Gear title.

The cardboard box is cool though.

Elsewhere, it’s simply an unintuitive game, another in an era where the focus was on stalling or expecting players to buy guides. Snake often has to blow up walls that don’t appear more structurally unstable than others, not even to find hidden upgrades, but to beat the game at all. Bosses are only weak to specific weapons, like the helicopter, which requires the grenade launcher, but for some reason can’t be harmed by remote-controlled missiles. This is where Snake’s radio comes into play, but it’s cumbersome to use, you often won’t get a response, and the people you do contact don’t tend to say anything fun, so I tended to put it off. Their dialogue is also determined by the room you’re in, not what you need to do next, which is confusing, and means you’ll need to call a specific person from a very specific room to get the help you need. In at least one case, this is not just for a hint: calling in gets someone to unlock a door for you. I’m pretty sure you can get the game into an unwinnable state by offending one of this radio contact, too.

Instant-death floor traps are more evidence of weak game design, as they can only be avoided through trial and error. And if someone is playing blind, they can only randomly backtrack to each of the doors they previously couldn’t open each time they get a new keycard, as players aren’t told which keycard opens a door, and can only try each of them, one by one. It’s ridiculous both in that the doors aren’t numbered or color-coded, and that keycards don’t work automatically without being equipped. It’s just bizarre that Snake has to take off his gas mask in a gas-filled room to equip a keycard before using it.

It’d also be nice if a pickup would just fill your ammunition or rations to the max, since they’re going to reappear every time you exit and reenter the rooms anyway.

Frankly, this hasn’t held up as anything special, and is only played today for the reason I played it: to experience the series in its entirety, and for familiarity with the events on the timeline. This is set in 1995, taking place after MGSV, and a deep reading of the MGSV lore does add some interesting context here, but there’s no sense getting into that. The young Solid Snake learns about Metal Gears, and we meet Big Boss, Grey Fox, and a couple other characters, but there’s not really much in the way of writing here to inform the rest of the series. 99% of the dialogue is telling you where to go, or how to blow something up. Big Boss betrays Solid Snake (an extremely basic spoiler anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the series knows already), first by providing bogus radio tips to make things more difficult. This is creative in the sense that it moves the plot within the context of 1980s NPCs serving as nothing more than terse, dispassionate hint dispensaries, but it’s a small thing. In the end, the Wikipedia article for this game does more to explain Solid Snake’s background with Big Boss than actually playing through it does, but it’s not long either, so I wouldn’t discourage hardcore Metal Gear fans away from it.

The reviewer believes this game stands above total mediocrity. It has something going for it, but ultimately few real merits. Most of the time, it isn’t fun, and doesn’t otherwise provide any sort of emotional payoff. Even though it does some cool things, you should play something else instead.